Jesse Waugh
I first noticed Jesse Waugh as a young student at L.A.City College in 1995. He would sit in the History of Cinema class, on the right hand side of one of the front rows of the college movie theater, with his roaring twenties-style, buzzed-on-the-back-and-sides, neatly-combed-on-top haircut. When I saw him working at the Temporary Contemporary Art Museum downtown I approached him to model for some photos, not realizing how well my offer fit into his particular style of self-expression. The intention behind Jesse’s art, while it can’t be pinned down in a few words, has a lot to do with exploring—or a more precise word might be celebrating—the self and the ego. His work is informed by his religious upbringing in a California church with a doctrine based in Hinduism. While riffing on the church’s mythology and iconography, Jesse’s art is in part a howl of dissent against its core ideas, or at least the way they have become codified. There’s a concept I once heard expressed by Guru Singh of Yoga West—one of the pre-eminent American teachers of Kundalini Yoga—that rather than suppressing the ego, we should work to expand it out to infinity, so that it encompasses the entirety of the universe. And that is probably one of the defining principles behind what Jesse strives to express. He doesn’t interest himself in popular culture, or arguably even in the temporal human experience. His work operates in a dimension populated by gods, angels, the bending of light; a dimension where the beating of a butterfly wing is connected to a nuclear bomb explosion. A piece of fruit, the L.A. River, or Rice, his late, beloved pet dove, are all seen as sort of Biblical entities. His work also seems—heretically for the times we live in—to have little need for an audience. He makes it available to the public, but beyond that it could be seen by thousands of people or one person or no one without causing him much concern. He operates for the most part well outside of any tradition or movement.
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